


we will go, we will sleep

by piggy09



Series: boxes [4]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Did you see the latest episode? That's what warnings you need here, Flashbacks Galore, Gen, That's the only place Maggie and Sarah show up sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 23:07:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3914077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The footsteps move away from her cage, and Helena gets back to work doing what she does best: using her teeth. She cannot be a mother now. She can only be a key; she can only be a key gnawed out of bone, something that was once animal now made to open cages.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we will go, we will sleep

**Author's Note:**

> [warnings: unsanitary, unreality, needles, drugs, nonconsensual medical procedures and flashbacks to the same, reference to self-harm, gore, violence]

It is frightening how soon you can get used to a cage, when there is food inside of it.

They have not really bothered her today – all these men, these different heads for the same horse. Neigh. Yesterday they pulled her out of the cage, jabbed a sharp needle in her arm when she tried to fight them. She forgets the rest. She does not remember. But she woke up back in her cage, with a headache, and since then she has not been bothered. They watch her through the bars and they give her food, and so Helena watches them back and eats it. She is eating for two now, like – like someone told her. Except no one would tell her that, because she has been in this cage. She does not know.

She’s starting to grow very tired of chicken. The last time she had chicken there were little pills sewn under its skin, enough to make her go to sleep. The taste of it in her mouth reminds her of weddings, which makes her think of Sarah, which makes her even more hungry. It is a very vicious circle. It is a circle with many teeth.

Helena pushes chicken between _her_ teeth, chews. Absentmindedly she flips the chicken between her hands, just to check, just to make sure there are no—

Her fingers brush against the chicken’s bones.

Oh.

_Oh._

She cleans all the meat off with her teeth – do not waste food, never waste food – and hides the bone, to make it safe. She is starting to think again; like putting the pieces of a gun together, click click click, she is remembering small things. The needle. A soft blue picture of a room, a box outside of this box. A memory.

(“It’s called a _tourniquet,_ ” Maggie says softly, and Helena nods. Turn-i-ket. Easy. Maggie ties the cord tightly around Helena’s arm, and Helena makes a hurt sound – it is tight, and she can something pooling in her arm. Is it blood? What is happening to her?

“Sometimes parts of your body might start bleeding,” Maggie says, watching Helena’s arm like something about it is a miracle. “But you can’t stop your mission. If you tie a rope or cord or string very tightly around the top of your limb—” She pauses, watching Helena struggling to translate. “—arm or leg, Helena – it will stop the flow of blood for a little while, and you can keep going.”

Helena nods, and Maggie laughs. “Smart girl. You were made for this, you know. This is your purpose.”

 _Smart girl_ , Helena thinks, and feels her blood pump through her body with each heartbeat, thump thump thump.)

Helena blinks, startles herself awake. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Maggie is bones in the ground. Helena is _not_ , and so Helena has to _move_. She stands up and looks through the window – no soldier boys outside, no Mark-faces, no Paul-faces. No one. Just the camera in the wall, looking at her with its one red eye. She pulls the string out of her pants and wraps it around her arm, pulls it tight with her teeth. She can feel her blood pooling. She wonders what Maggie would think if Maggie could see Helena now – would she be proud? Would she be very angry, that Helena does not have a mission anymore? Would she say, _go, go be with Sarah_? What would she do?

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t, it doesn’t. Helena lets these thoughts rattle through her mind like empty bullet casings, pats the string – pulled tight – and shrugs on the shirt they have given her for the dark cold desert nights.

Then she lets herself loose – everything, her need for Sarah to come help her, her sudden sharp confusion over Maggie, her love for her child, her anger anger rage. She laughs, she flips the bed over, she is laughing, she is screaming, she is roaring—

—outside, a yell: _Keep it down_ —

—she is laughing laughing laughing, slamming herself against the bars. Her head hurts – she has made herself bleed. Isn’t that funny! Isn’t that the funniest thing you have ever seen, Helena bleeding Sarah’s blood all over the bars, Helena hurt from the head and not the heart this time. She can’t quite stop herself laughing now, sounds clawing their way from her throat. Nothing is funny anymore. On the inside she is cold, suddenly, and afraid, but she can’t stop laughing. She picks up the bucket and hurls it through the window. She hopes her piss gets in their mouths, she hopes they choke on it. They made her piss in a _bucket_. And, just like that, she is angry again.

Then they open the door, finally, _finally_ they are stupid enough to let themselves in the cage. Helena’s arm hurts and hurts and hurts but she sneers at them anyways, keeps laughing. What are they going to do? Kill her? Beat her? They can’t hurt her _baby_ , her little angel, her tiny piece of lev-er-age.

They push her against the wall, and all the voices under Helena’s skin start yelling stop do not _on_ the skin lay the hands bones. Do not. Skin. Touch. Don’t like.

“Helena,” says a voice, soothing, and for one stuttering second Helena thinks someone else’s name. But no, it is the doctor again, pretending to be a mother. Pretending she cares.

“It breaks my _heart_ to see you hurt yourself like this,” the doctor says, not looking at Helena but looking at the needle she is holding. Oh, Helena could say many things about _that_. If it is breaking your heart why do you keep me here. If it is breaking your heart why are you not sad. I could break your heart for real, if you would like. I could crack it in two. Give me a gun.

Instead she spits. That is all she really needs to say.

“You know how this goes,” the doctor says, coming closer. “Keep still if you don’t want it to hurt.”

Helena’s arm is already cold and she prays to – someone, she prays with a blank space where a name should be: _please let this work. Please let me out of my box._ Her head goes soft and sways away from her, and that is the drugs in her blood. But all of her blood is in her arm, so: _please_.

She lets herself fall asleep very fast, leans against the man who was holding her against the wall. He smells like sweat, and not Sarah. She is very tired. Her head hurts. But she feels like she is floating in much water, moving her arms and legs to keep herself there – that is, she is not drowning. So. It must have worked.

But she is so tired, so very tired, and so for now she lets herself fall asleep.

* * *

She wakes up, and

she wakes up,

And she wakes up,

and Pupok is rattling at She wakes up,

rattling at her. So Pupok is back, which is

nice. Probably. Helena thinks they fought, the last time they spoke, but she doesn’t quite Wakes up, remember. Her head hurts. The drugs are crawling through her blood, but slowly. Very v e r y s l  o  w and Pupok is hissing at her. Angry bug.

 _Helena!_ the scorpion says. _Helena, get up. They’re gone._ She opens her eyes, so. She opens her eyes.

 _Hurry up,_ Pupok hisses. _We don’t have much time before the drugs set in._ Helena turns to watch the little bug crawl in little circles. She sits up. The world gets many halos, for a moment, but then it is just the world again – dirt-brown and smelly. She goes to move off the bed.

“My arm is like dead fish,” she mutters. Maggie Maggie. Tomas Maggie. Dead fish Alexis Maggie. Ha. Ha. Dead fish.

 _You have to stay alert_ , Pupok says slowly, and Helena stares at her arm. _Look for an escape_ , Maggie says, pulling the string tighter. _Smart girl. Your mission._

Helena blinks, closes her eyes tight and opens them. Look for an escape. She crouches, watches Pupok. It was _Pupok_ who said that, not Maggie. Maggie is dead.

“To escape the first box,” she tells the scorpion, “you must know what next box holds.”

 _Right_ , says Pupok, which is a relief: Helena is mostly certain what she said did not make sense. _Scout this place and get back here_. This is also a relief: Helena is not a soldier, probably, but orders are easy and they make sense. Kill her. Don’t kill her. Find the edges of this box. Easy. She stands up, fumbles a little, but makes it. Makes it. She stands up, but makes it.

 _Don’t blunder around like an idiot_ , Pupok says sharply. Bitter angry bug.

“I will be as quiet as church mouse,” Helena says. Church. mouse. Church mice eating church cheese. Church mice following swan men to churches, Maggie Sarah Sarah Maggie. Sarah stepping out of the door of the church Maggie. Shh. Quiet now. She makes her way out the door, quiet. Her arm is not working right, but she never needed her right hand for anything anyways. That was Sarah’s job. Should have been.

(She had a dream, once—)

(— _I love you too_ —)

Helena shakes herself out of that, dream clinging to her like spiderwebs, and runs past a soldier boy on patrol. Through a door, and back into the dark hallways underneath the club, lit with sick green lighting, a tail clenched in her hand still dripping and a name on her tongue, _Sarah Sarah Sarah_ – no. She turns a corner. The light is yellow. There is a man with a gun. This is not – this is not then, that time-that-was.

 _Sarah, my name is Sarah_ , gasps a voice. Helena presses her hand against the wall. Stone. This is bad. She is starting to forget when she is,

she looks through the window. Nothing there but another box, a box in a box. The world is growing blue around the edges. Men with surgical masks over their mouths flicker in the corners of Helena’s eyes. Bad bad bad.

 _Helena Helena Helena_ , says a voice, two voices, three. Helena doesn’t know who’s talking to her. For a dizzy second she thinks it is her child, grown a mouth and taught to speak. _Helena_. But no, no, her baby is in her belly, where an unborn child is supposed to be. And Sarah is not here, that is not when Helena is. And Maggie is dead. No child, no sister, no

family too

(—and Sarah said—)

 _Hurry up, you’re gonna pass out_ , Pupok snaps at her, and Helena is dizzy enough to think: _I am listening to a_ scorpion _, I am listening to a bug._ But also: keep moving, soldier.

“No no no no,” she slurs, “not yet.” She feels for the cord, tied tight like Maggie taught her, and pushes herself forward. Marching ever forward, like climbing onto a motorbike even when you are bleeding. No, like – bleeding. Like – bleeding. Like – bleeding.

Helena pulls herself into the dark, passes the cage where Tomas had locked her, moves forward. No longer in the light. And these cages are not those cages, these cages are these cages, where Helena was in a box. In a box in a box. Box box box. Pupok. Pupoks. Pupoks box and yes, those are the drugs. She stumbles forward, dreamy steps through cobbled streets and alleyways, diner floors and apartments and warehouses. There is a fan on the wall, so Helena leans on it. Leans on the wall so Helena on the fan wall. Wall.

She looks through the whirring blades blades blades _And now it has a new blade and a very special wielder_ Maggie says _I know you’ll do great things with_ a room, where a woman in a white dress is being carried by a man with a cowboy hat, and she is

not real. That was not real. There is a room, and it is blue like the lights at the corners of Helena’s eyes, but it is not the room Helena was taken to, it is not the same room and that room is not real. The rooms are blurring together, but Helena looks through her mind like looking through a sniper scope and sees people walking,

of a brain,

tattooed on the inside of his arm. Two horses

slurring words Helena can’t understand. _Parsons_ , maybe. Sounds of pain. They are parting her legs, and she can’t fight it, and she can’t move, and she

is walking out of the room – the _doctor_ , Doctor Coady, walking out of the room where pain-sounds are coming from. Concentrate-Helena. That is not good. Helena does not like the doctor, especially when he gives her a razor blade, and she is coming closer so Helena ducks. Down on the ground, quiet as a mouse. Shh. She is quiet, but she is screaming – no, that is not her. It is the man. There is a man in the chair, and his eyes are open, and they are

(us,” Sarah says, desperate, her fingers outstretched towards Helena’s gun. Helena is staring at her, just as desperate – _You know that connection you feel, I feel it too_ , and her poor hopeful heart is pounding and pounding, singing _Sarah feels it, Sarah loves you too, Sarah_ loves you _, Sarah loves you too, Sarah_ )

(hands her a razor blade, says)

(“Smart girl,”)

(and Helena knew that Sarah would come for her, when Helena was trapped in a cage. No. She didn’t know, but she hoped, even when)

(the doctor said _Sarah sold you out_ but Helena refuses to believe her. She lies in the bed in the box in the cage and puts her thumb between her teeth, rocks back and forth. Sarah is coming for her. Sarah is coming for her. Sarah is coming for her. Sarah is)

the same. His eyes are the same as Helena’s were, every single time someone else has hurt her. She knows, she knows, she can _feel_ it. His eyes are angry, and his eyes are angry, and his afraid. So afraid. She can taste it in the whites of his eyes, and it hurts her like scars knitting their way across her chest.

Around her, the world is going blue. Helena’s eyes close but she can still see not-Mark’s eyes, watching her and watching her as she

f

a

l

l

s

d

o

w

n

.

Stands up again. Stumbles and bumbles and fumbles and moves forward, step by step. Somewhere she can

hear Sarah screaming, except it is Helena screaming, except it is not-Mark in the room,

screaming,

Helena’s back hurts, and her head, and her heart, and her not-heart, and

she is tired, and

Pupok is rattling, and

she wants someone to pick her up and carry her, just for a little while,

just until things are a little

less

blurry.

Such a short time. One breath, than another. In. out. in. Out. in.

Out.

In.

She can see the bed in front of her – she is almost, there – but she can’t make     her feet take

      another step.

So she

falls.

* * *

She wakes up in her bed again, back in that same comfortable cage. Oh, her head hurts. But when she closes her eyes she can see where she’s been, a tracing of veins on her skin leading to a beating heart. Somewhere, in the body-maze of this building, there is someone screaming. That is the heart of this place, Helena thinks. The heart of this place is a Mark-faced man who is screaming and screaming and screaming. What does that make this place, anyways, besides the worst sort of cage? It makes this place a ship, a compound, it makes this place _stink_.

Helena considers this as she digs under the mattress, finds the bone she’d kept there. Helena considers this as she remembers, very hard, the shape of the key ring on a man’s belt. Helena considers this as she does what she knows best: uses her teeth.

She takes it out of her mouth to look at the shape of it. Close! But it is not yet what she needs. It is not yet the sort of key that opens cages—

A sound.

She throws herself on the bed, dreams of dreaming. Shh. Shhhhh. She pulls all of her Helena-self to her belly, hides there with her child for a few aching quiet moments. Hello. Hello. I am trying so hard to not let you get hurt. I am trying so hard to not let anyone get hurt.

The footsteps move away again, and Helena gets back to work. She cannot be a mother now. She can only be a key; she can only be a key gnawed out of bone, something that was once animal now made to open cages.

She passes the time gnawing gnawing gnawing, sleeping whenever a soldier comes to check on her. Like clockwork. Every time they look in on her the stitches on her head ache; Helena dreams she can feel the smear of blood she left on the bars, dripping its slow way down to the floor. Slowly becoming rust.

But she can’t feel it. She is only herself, and the hand of herself wrapped around her completed key.

Her completed key.

The next time a soldier boy makes his tick-ticking way away from Helena’s box, she moves. She pulls out the key and sticks her hand through the bars, shakes herself out of a memory of doing the same, dialing buttons on her phone, hoping against hope that Sarah would pick up.

What is important to remember is this: Sarah is not _here_. It is Helena, as always, who must free Helena from her own cage.

So Helena pushes her arm through the bars, fumbles for the key and manages to push it into the lock. She turns it back and forth and back, but it does not want to let her free. Part of her wants to scream and bang on the walls, but she is not _stupid_. That would draw the soldiers back, and it would do nothing. So instead she stays very calm, keeps trying.

Until the camera turns back. Then she pulls the key back, drops herself to the ground and considers the bone. It did not work. She will have to make the key better; the key must be deserving of its mission, its purpose.

So she tries again. Gnaws on the key to make it better, even better than it was, and finds the lock to put the key inside of it.

_There._

There is a _click_ like the clicking of teeth-on-teeth, and the door is open. The next box escaped. Helena ducks down to avoid a marching soldier, gun held in his arms not like a baby. Once he has passed she lets herself stand up again. The camera is not looking at her; it is watching a wall again. Go, Helena. Helena _move_.

She opens the door and makes her way out of it, passing like blood through the veins of the building. Her body aches and groans but she shushes it, carves an unsteady path ever forward.

She knows where to go. There was never a question of where to go.

Helena makes her way through a world made cool and blue by night and not by dreams, passes the metal webs of cages that were not hers. Like blood, she makes her way back to the heart. Like a bullet, she makes her way back to the heart.

And there it is: the room where the man lay screaming, the room where the man lay dreaming. It is cold and silent now. There is no noise in it, but Helena can feel it shivering on her skin: hurt, and suffering, so loud it is like a constant sound. It makes something in the pit of her throat keen, a high afraid sound like an animal or a child. She wants to reach for her belly, reassure herself her child is alright, but that is not something she can do here. Her hands curl and uncurl at her sides, and she walks forward. Step. Step. Step.

There is a board dangling by the door, with a piece of paper on it. Helena picks it up. It says many things to her that she does not understand or want to – words and numbers, strung together like chains. But at the top: _Parsons_. Helena closes her eyes, remembers the warped sound of screaming. _Parsons_. A tattoo of a horse. Those eyes, meeting hers.

She drops the board and walks into the room slow, slow, tender like a child. In the middle of the room is a man dressed in virginal white – unstained by blood, not like Helena-in-white. Helena-in-white always bleeds, eventually; but here Parsons sits, unmoving, his eyes doing their best to flee. His mouth opening and closing, whispering a low soft sound to itself.

“You must be Parsons,” Helena says. Who else could he be?

He opens his mouth, makes a soft sound. Helena pads closer, slow step-by-step. He’s whimpering.

“Please,” he says. Then nothing else. He is trying, Helena thinks – he is trying very hard to make words, but his body has trapped him in a cage and now he cannot let the words escape. His bones are not keys. His bones cannot be made into keys. There is no way for him to escape this box.

He’s rattling sounds as Helena looks at him: the tubes that are growing out of his body, the metal cage wired around his head. The cloth over his scalp, where hair should be.

“What did they do to you?” she asks, soft. Not _what happened to you_. That is not a question anybody should be asked. Helena does not like to ask _what did they do to you_ either, not really (a fishtank, men with masks over their face, move Helena, run Helena, but Helena cannot move _what did they do to you what did they do to you_ she wakes up and her hand is shaking on the glass, enough to startle the fish), but she is beginning to understand why people ask it: what else can you say, when you see someone hurting like that? How else can you help them, unless you understand what someone else has done?

She lifts the cloth.

For a second, she cannot stop herself from staring; something twists up the corner of her mouth, something that is not in any way laughter. His brain is stuck full of metal, like Helena’s skin. His brain is outside of his skull, like Helena’s skin. No one’s brain should be Helena’s skin. Helena’s skin should not even be Helena’s skin. This is _sick_. This is sick and wrong and wrong and wrong.

A hand fumbles for her arm, grabs it in shaking fingers. It is not Helena’s dead arm. (Both of Parson’s arms are his dead arms, she thinks.) She can feel the fingers wrapping around it, tight and tighter.

“Kill…me,” Parsons wheezes.

Helena stares at him. Helena cannot stop herself from staring; her brain has gone quiet and dark, like being dead, like falling asleep. _Kill me_. Her first thought is: _no_ , loud as a gunshot that does not kill. Loud as a gunshot that misses. No, no, because this is unfair: Helena has moved past killing, moved so far past being a gun or a blade or a weapon. She has tried so hard not to miss it. She has done her best to not be this thing that she was, this thing that breaks. This thing that could only break.

And now here she is, trying to help, and the only way she can help is to go right back to killing again. God is so angry with her. God must hate Helena so much.

“K-k-kill…me,” Parsons says again, every part of his face twitching with desperation. Oh god. Oh god.

There’s a low angry rattling sound from Helena’s right hand, her not-dead hand, the hand that Parsons has dropped.

 _Stupid girl_ , Pupok drawls. _Why would you waste your chance of escape on him? He’s already dead._

The scorpion keeps talking, but all Helena can hear are the low hurt sounds underneath those stinger-words. The quiet, gasping pains.

 _Get moving,_ says Pupok. _Leave him_.

Parsons says:

“Please.”

And Helena is watching the scorpion crawl all over her fingers, but what she is thinking about is Helena. Helena in the basement of a convent, crying in the dark. Helena after Maggie died, sitting in on herself, bowed with grief. Helena walking the whole way to the hospital after Sarah shot her. Helena carrying her child away from the compound, all the way home. What she is thinking about: Helena alone.

If only there had been someone to help her, then. If only she had not needed to be alone.

“We’ve both been abandoned by our families,” Helena says, in a voice that is low like a lullaby. Her fingers reach out and trace Parson’s face; her fingers forget the difference between the cage and the man inside of it, trace over metal and skin alike. “Left to suffer.”

“I will make it go away,” she whispers. “No more pain, little one.” She can hear the tears filling her voice, but they are not important. She is not crying for herself, anyways – this is alright. This is killing, but oh this is alright. This is not a punishment. This is not a mercy. This is a gift. This is everything she has ever wished someone would do for her: touch her face with gentle fingers, and call her sweet and tender things, and help her when she could not help herself.

This is not about Helena, though. That is not the mistake Helena is making. She is not setting Helena free – Helena is staying trapped here, in these boxes, so that someone else can go free instead. But to get the chance to help someone else, in the only way she can…that is a gift, too, she thinks.

“Shh,” she whispers. Her fingers wrap around a scalpel. Tears drip down her face as she grasps it, begins to hum a lullaby. She is Sarah, she is Maggie, she is _Helena_ – she is the Helena her child could meet, one day, she is the only Helena this man will know. She is an angel. She is a scalpel. She is holding this man, the best she can, one arm wrapped tenderly around him. She is raising the blade.

When she stabs it in the machines start screaming, high wails and beeps, but Helena keeps singing anyways. It is all that she can do. She had a dream, once, where Sarah sang her a lullaby and Sarah said _I love you too_.

“Sleep now, lambchop,” Helena whispers, her own mouth forming Sarah’s sort of words: meat-as-love. You are more than meat, now. You are more than what they have made you, meathead.

“Sleep,” she whispers, and jerks the blade forward. _Sleep_ , she whispers, and he does.

An alarm goes off, and Helena lays a gentle kiss on his forehead. _Na dobranich, anhel._

The door opens and the doctor comes tearing in, ripping through anything resembling peace. Helena jerks the scalpel out of Parson’s head; the sound of it is not like Doctor Coady yelling _Guards_.

“You _stupid_ girl,” the doctor hisses, and Helena could laugh: Pupok called her _stupid girl_ , now this woman is calling her _stupid girl_ , but a long time ago in a patch of sunshine Maggie called her _smart_. In her dream Sarah said _I love you too_ , and meant it. Helena is only what she has been made; Helena is cobbled together of dreams and memories, sewn tight by scars. Helena stopped being afraid a long time ago, in a room standing next to a girl whose hair was red like a fire. Helena is not stupid. Helena is no longer a _girl._

“You say you love boys,” Helena says, “but you lie.” Anger is building in her chest like a scream, because: Doctor Coady _said_ , and like everyone else she was a liar. Like everyone else she has left her children to be hurt, and Helena cannot save every child. Helena would like to save every child, but she can’t, and mothers abandon their children but Helena would _never_ and that is howling in her—

“You’re a _shit_ mother!” she roars, Sarah’s words and Helena’s rage, Helena’s grief and Helena’s rage. The love Helena carries in her chest for Sarah, Sarah muttering _shit_ as they set up the tent, Sarah talking about Kira by the glow of lantern light. Helena’s rage for being parted from Sarah, being parted from everyone, again and again losing her family. Losing her mothers. Helena’s grief for all the mothers she has lost, all the mothers she could not have. Helena’s rage for the mother she does not have the chance to be – she has given up her chance, so she could fix the mistakes of a different mother. She has lost her chance to keep her child safe, so someone else could go free.

“Take her,” Doctor Coady says, and Helena drops the scalpel. Her hand feels empty without it, but that’s alright. She does not think she needs it anymore.

Helena closes her eyes, just for a second, and prays as quickly as she can for Parson’s soul. She hopes that he is free. She hopes that he has found his freedom, even as she is being pulled further and further away from her own.

 _Amen_ , she thinks to herself, and lets them put her back inside the box.

**Author's Note:**

> Where the house is warm,  
> Where the child is small,  
> There we will go,  
> And rock the child to sleep.
> 
> There we will sleep,  
> and will rock the child:  
> Sleep, sleep, my little falcon,  
> Sleep, sleep, my little dove.  
> \--"Oi Khodyt Son Kolo Vikon"
> 
> That's the lullaby Helena sings in the previous episode, by the way.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos/comment if you liked!


End file.
